My taxi from the airport overcharged me by maybe sixty yuan and I knew it at the time. The driver had refused to start the meter, said something I did not understand, made a circular hand gesture that I read as “fixed price.” It was 11pm, the line for licensed cabs at Terminal 3 had been forty minutes long, and I had a suitcase full of winter clothes that I did not need because I had badly misread the late-October forecast for north China.
I paid him. I got out at what he said was my guesthouse and it was not my guesthouse. It was a hutong entrance four hundred meters away from my guesthouse, because cars cannot fit down most of the actual alleys. He had done the normal thing. I just did not know it yet.
So that is how my week in Beijing started: dragging a 23kg suitcase over uneven gray brick at midnight, past a closed dumpling place and a man playing chess by himself under a streetlight, looking for door number 17.
Day 2 and I Still Could Not Find the Subway Exit
The Beijing subway is excellent. It is also enormous, and the transfer at Dongzhimen involves what felt like a kilometer of underground corridor lined with advertisements for IVF clinics and milk tea. I came up at the wrong exit twice in one morning. The first time I emerged into a six-lane road I did not recognize. The second time I emerged into the same six-lane road from the opposite side, which somehow felt worse.
I had been told to download Amap before flying in. I had not. By the time I gave up and tried to install it, my SIM was on Chinese 4G and the App Store thought I was a tourist who should not be allowed to download Chinese apps. I had to switch back to airplane mode, connect to a cafe wifi behind a VPN, and then finally the download worked. That took an hour and one bad latte. I should have just done that before I flew — by the third day I could not remember how I had functioned without it.
The subway ride itself was 4 yuan. That is roughly fifty-five cents US for a forty-minute ride across most of the city. I paid by holding my phone to a reader after I had finally gotten WeChat Pay working, which is its own saga and one I will not relitigate here other than to say it works now with foreign cards but you want to set it up before the trip, not after.
The Queue at the Forbidden City Started Before I Woke Up
I got to Tiananmen at 7:50am on a Wednesday and the line for the south gate already wrapped past the flower beds. I had booked a ticket online the night before — they cap the daily entries at 80,000 and on weekdays in October that is still not enough. A family from Wuhan let me stand with them because I looked so confused at the ticket scanning gate that the grandmother took pity on me. She held her phone under the scanner and mine too. I still do not know how she knew my ticket code was on the same page as hers.
The Forbidden City is 180 yuan for the full ticket including the clock exhibition and the treasure gallery. I did both because by the time I had walked through the first three courtyards I realized I was only going to do this once. The sheer scale is the thing that does not come through in photographs. Each courtyard opens onto a bigger one. You keep thinking you are at the main hall and then there is another gate, another open space, another set of stairs.
The smog day and the clear day
On day 3 the sky was the color of a dirty aquarium. I could see maybe three hundred meters down the road from my guesthouse window. The air tasted metallic. I wore an N95 mask I had packed for exactly this and still felt it in my throat by noon. The Temple of Heaven was a gray shape behind gray air. I walked through the park for an hour, watched a group of retired men doing tai chi under a bare elm tree, and left. The photos from that day look like they were shot through a shower curtain.
On day 5, the wind came from the northwest overnight. I woke up to actual blue. Real blue, the kind that makes you understand why there are so many classical poems about the sky over Beijing in autumn. I walked to Jingshan Park at 6:30am and climbed the hill behind the Forbidden City. The whole palace complex was laid out below me in a straight line of gold roofs and red walls, north to south, disappearing into the distance.
I sat on a bench at the top of that hill for a while. I did not take a photo for the first ten minutes. I just sat there, in a puffer jacket I had bought at a market two days earlier for 120 yuan because the one I brought was not warm enough, eating a steamed bun from a woman at the base of the hill who had sold it to me for 3 yuan and given me a thumbs up when I said “xie xie.”
The Restaurant With No Sign and the Eggplant That Ruined Other Eggplants
The place was on a side street in Gulou, six tables, glass counter with cold dishes, no English menu and no Chinese menu that I could parse either. The woman running it pointed at things. I nodded at most of them. The result was four dishes for sixty-eight yuan total and one of them was an eggplant in garlic sauce that has set a permanent benchmark in my brain.
I went back twice. The second time the woman recognized me and brought out a small plate of pickled radish I had not ordered. The third time her husband came out from the back and tried to ask me where I was from. We could not communicate beyond country names but he poured me a small cup of baijiu and we toasted with the universal raised glass.
I never learned the name of that place. It is on a street whose name I cannot recall, somewhere south of the Drum Tower. I tried to find it on a map later and I cannot. That bothers me a little. It also makes me think I should go back to Beijing just to find it again, which is probably the point.
I ate Peking duck on day 6 at a place called Siji Minfu near Dongsi. The half duck plus pancakes plus condiments came to about 140 yuan and I went alone, which the host found surprising enough that she sat me at a corner table near the kitchen as if I were a small problem to be managed quietly. The duck was carved at the table by a chef in a tall white hat who handed me a small plate with a single warm slice as a kind of test. I ate it. He nodded once and went back to work on the rest.
The skin was the thing. The meat was good. The skin was something else. Northern Chinese food is its own conversation and I had walked into it without much preparation.
Tiananmen at 5am Was the Strangest Place I Have Ever Stood
The flag-raising ceremony at sunrise is one of those things every guide mentions and most people skip because the time changes daily and is always early. On my second-to-last morning I set an alarm for 4:45am and walked through empty hutongs to the square. The metro was not open yet. The streets had a kind of pre-dawn silence I had not associated with Beijing at all up to that point.
There were already a few hundred people gathered behind the barriers when I got there at 5:30. By 6 there were maybe two thousand. Most were Chinese tourists, families with sleepy children, older couples in matching windbreakers. A small honor guard came out of Tiananmen gate in a tight formation, crossed the road in absolute silence, and ran the flag up the pole at the exact moment the sun cleared the buildings to the east.
It was over in maybe four minutes.
I stood there for another twenty minutes after the crowd dispersed, watching the light hit the long red wall under the Mao portrait and the broad empty paving stones of the square as the morning settled in. A street sweeper went past with a long bamboo broom. Someone was playing a small recording of patriotic music from a phone. It felt like the city had not quite decided to start the day yet.
The Wall Day Was a Six-Hour Round Trip and Worth Every Minute
I went to Mutianyu instead of Badaling, on the advice of basically everyone I asked. It was a 90-minute drive from central Beijing by hired car, which I shared with three other guests from my guesthouse for 200 yuan each round trip. We left at 7am, were on the wall by 9:30, and were back in town by 4. The full breakdown of why Mutianyu was the right call is its own thing, but the short version is: fewer people, restored sections, a chairlift up that meant we did not lose an hour climbing stairs in jackets.
I walked from watchtower 14 to watchtower 20 and back. The wall under my boots was a mix of original Ming-era brick and newer restoration patching, and I could tell the difference because the old brick was uneven and the new brick was not. Past tower 20 the wall becomes wild, unrestored, sections crumbled and overgrown with small trees. I sat on a parapet there and ate an apple I had bought from a vendor at the parking lot for 5 yuan. Two German hikers passed and we exchanged the small nod that people on the same kind of trip give each other.
I did the toboggan down. I am 38 years old and I did the toboggan down and I would do it again.
The Practical Bits I Wish Someone Had Bullet-Pointed at Me
I am going to break my own rule here and list a few things, because some of this is just logistics and there is no narrative reason to bury it in a paragraph about an eggplant. If you are flying into PEK or PKX for a first week in Beijing, this is what I wish I had known before I left:
- Airport taxi: from PEK Terminal 3 to the city center should be around 120 yuan on the meter. Insist on the meter. If they will not start it, get out and join the next car in the licensed line.
- Subway: 3 to 9 yuan per ride depending on distance. WeChat Pay or Alipay both work at the turnstile. A physical card is no longer necessary.
- Forbidden City tickets: 60 yuan low season, 80 yuan high season, must be booked online up to 7 days in advance via the official mini program. They sell out by 9am most days.
- Great Wall day trip: hired car to Mutianyu, around 600 to 800 yuan for a private car, much cheaper split four ways like I did. Wall entry plus chairlift plus toboggan is around 200 yuan.
- Hutong guesthouses: 250 to 500 yuan a night in shared courtyard style places near the Drum Tower. They are charming. They are also cold in October.
- Eating: a full meal at a hole-in-the-wall is 30 to 80 yuan. A nice Peking duck dinner is 150 to 250 yuan per person. Coffee at a hipster cafe is 35 to 50 yuan, same as Brooklyn.
That is the only list in this whole thing, I promise. Back to the story.
Leaving on the Airport Express With Frozen Hands
I left on a Tuesday morning. The Airport Express from Dongzhimen is 25 yuan and takes about 25 minutes to Terminal 3, and on that particular morning I was the only passenger in my car for the first three stops. I had finished my coffee. I had three small packets of dried jujube in my backpack that I had bought from a woman at a market on Wangfujing the night before. My boots had a fine coating of gray dust from the wall.
I had not learned more than maybe twenty words of Mandarin over the seven days. I had been overcharged a total of perhaps a hundred yuan across all my taxis and street purchases combined, which is fifteen dollars over a week, which is fine. I had not made it to the Summer Palace. I had skipped the 798 art district entirely because by the end I was tired and just wanted to walk. I had eaten enough scallion pancakes to last me until I come back.
The train pulled into the terminal. I gathered my bag, walked through the connecting tunnel, and stood in the check-in line behind a man wearing a hutong tour company T-shirt with a slogan on the back I could not read. My hands were cold because I had put my gloves in checked luggage two days ago and forgotten about it. I ate one of the jujubes while I waited. It tasted like the trip had — a little sweet, a little smoky, mostly something I had not had before.
